


My Little Devil

by redmasque



Series: Vodou!AU [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Vodou, Voodoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 17:55:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3859459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redmasque/pseuds/redmasque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the first pre-story extension for Just A Little Bit Bad.</p>
<p>"The witch’s house is small and crooked, as is suitable for a witch. She lives there with her husband and sons and her many secrets. She knows she is a witch, because that’s what the children call her, when she walks through the narrow streets of her city, her arms full of laundry or groceries. “Witch,” they whisper among themselves. Never to her face. Even the dullest of them are too smart for that. Their parents are less gentle; “whore” is one of the kinder words they call her. She doesn’t mind. Why should she? She is a whore, by some lights. And if she’s not a priestess, a witch is as good a word as any other. They should be afraid of her. It’s only right." </p>
<p>Here, we meet Lucifer's mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Little Devil

**Author's Note:**

> This lovely character study was written by Sarah!  
> This character is about 4/5 her creation and maybe 1/5 mine (Mer's), so it's only right that she's the one to introduce her.  
> Lucifer's mother is close to our hearts. She's a strong woman who has been through a helluva lot, and she's not without flaws, but she's incredible. We love her dearly. 
> 
> Please pay attention to the tags. The warnings do apply.

The witch’s house is small and crooked, as is suitable for a witch. She lives there with her husband and sons and her many secrets. She knows she is a witch, because that’s what the children call her, when she walks through the narrow streets of her city, her arms full of laundry or groceries. “Witch,” they whisper among themselves. Never to her face. Even the dullest of them are too smart for that. Their parents are less gentle; “whore” is one of the kinder words they call her. She doesn’t mind. Why should she? She is a whore, by some lights. And if she’s not a priestess, a witch is as good a word as any other. They should be afraid of her. It’s only right.

Her son sits in his chair, staring mournfully out the window to where his brother plays in the dappled sunshine and mud of the street. The ferns are growing up between the paving stones, like delicate green flourishes. It’s spring. The time for children to be outside, being children. Outside the window, Gabriel laughs and slides down knees-first into a glassy puddle. He’s always been better than Lucifer at getting along with the other children. She’ll have to wash those clothes later.

“Lucifer,” she says. “Luci. Are you listening?”

His eyes slide back to her with a faint, painful, look of resignation. “Yes, mama.”

“You’re listening?”

“Yes, I’m listening, mama.”

“Do you want to go outside and play with your brother?”

His gaze flickers up to her face, wary as a trapped animal. He knows her too well to take this at face value. “Yes,” he says uncertainly.

“Are you angry at me because I won’t let you?”

A moment of hesitation, and then a slippery, uneasy, “No,” as if he’s about to go on, but he doesn’t. He’s not meeting her eyes anymore. He’s still a terrible liar. He’ll outgrow it.

“Luci.” She slips her fingers under his soft chin, tilts his head back. His eyes meet hers, wide and blue as pale winter. “No lies between us.”

He hesitates. “Maybe a little,” he admits.

“Good.” She squeezes the baby fat of his cheeks and lets him go. “Remember that feeling. Someday it will be very useful to you. Now tell me the ingredients for a conjure bag again, dear.”

At night sometimes the witch stands naked before the piece of glass which Chuck bought her and examines her body. She is twenty-one, and has had two children, but her skin is still smooth, her body still slim. She is beautiful, and her sons are too. Lucifer especially; a beautiful child who will be a beautiful man. This makes her glad. He looks nothing like her. On the street people stare at them, seeing only a black woman with a white child. She likes to think that maybe, despite his superficial resemblance to his father, there’s something about the eyes and mouth which echoes her, as well. He smiles like her, and when he’s angry his eyes grow flat like hers do. She hopes he grows to appreciate his physical attributes as she does hers. They are a form of power, too, and a very useful one. In a lot of ways, they paid for this house, their food, their clothes. She’s lucky.

There are scars on her, like fine wires running beneath her skin. She walks like an old woman, bent over her cane. When she tries to move too quickly, an electric jangle of pain bolts through her leg and leaves her weak. The people she sees, the ones who don’t know, look at her with the soft, nauseating, glow of pity. So young, to be a cripple. Such a tragedy. She thinks that maybe she hates them more than the ones who call her a witch out loud. A few days ago, in the kitchen, Chuck called out to her about a plate she was about to knock off the counter with her elbow, but he was on her bad side, and all she heard was a dull rustle as if from a distance. The plate broke. It’s not a big deal. She’ll use the pieces to make something else, something better. She always does.

“Love,” Chuck says cautiously. “Come to bed.”

She does so. She thinks that maybe she loves Chuck, if love means what she thinks it does. He’s kind, and he speaks softly and lets her carry on with her affairs in peace as long as she sleeps in his bed and makes his meals and listens to his gentle, if frequently awful, jokes. And sometimes when they’re together, and she’s sewing and he’s listening to the quiet symphony of the crickets in the grass outside, she’ll look at his fingers or the curve of his ear and feel a shining tenderness that seems to illuminate her whole body. She’s grateful for his presence in her life. When she prays, he is the first thing she gives thanks for. He saved her, in more ways than the physical way of starvation and exposure. Isn’t that love? That must be love. Even if it’s not, it’s probably the closest thing to love she’s ever likely to experience.

He says “Maybe you should let Lucifer out to play with Gabe more. He seems lonely.”

She shifts in the close, damp, hold of the bed. “He plays plenty.”

“He was inside all day.”

“So I’ll let him play tomorrow. It was a long lesson.”

He says, “All right,” mildly, and keeps his peace. Lucifer is her son, not his. He knows where to draw the boundaries, which is another thing she appreciates about him. Lucifer, she has decided, is a child without a father. He belongs to her entirely. The fact that he so strongly resembles a man who might well be dead now does not matter, because she has determined that it will not matter. She created him. He is hers, and she is his. There was no man involved in the process and there never really will be. She is sufficient.

Her own father has not spoken to her in eight years. She wonders if he’s dead by now, or still presiding over the regal, fragrant, darkness of his Hounfor. To him, she is long dead, and Lucifer never existed at all. It must be nice to exist in a world that simple. Inconvenient things simply disappear, never to be seen again. She can’t imagine living like that. Maybe it’s a gendered issue. Men have the option of behaving as though unpleasant occurrences don’t exist. Women, on the other hand, have to birth, raise, and feed them.

She tells herself, you’re getting bitter. It’s unbecoming. You’re better than this.

Lucifer comes home with dirt freckled on his clothes and a dark spray of arterial blood across his teeth, and she tells him, “You’re better than this.” 

“It wasn’t his fault,” Gabe says, twisting his shirt around his hands. “They were saying things. About you.” He stops as Lucifer gives him a look which manages to be decidedly murderous even on his eight-year-old features. Lucifer wipes his hand across his mouth. It comes away wet with a fresh, brilliant, streak of blood. One of his teeth is loose. 

“People will always be saying things about me,” the witch says, patting delicately at his face with the hem of her skirt. “And you, too. And sometimes Chuck and your brother. We have to let them do it. It doesn’t matter.”

He gives her an unreadable, dark, look. “It matters,” he says. 

She allows him to say that. One day he will understand, as she does, that it truly doesn’t. Nothing that  the small, bitter, people around them can do matters, because they will all die someday, and she and her son are part of the mysteries that transcend death. They understand things of such beauty and terror that beside them, everything else is trivial. The appropriate response to these dirty schoolyard tyrants is pity, not anger, because they will never know how tiny they really are. When she says  _you’re better than this,_ she means it. 

Years ago, when she was not much older than Lucifer, she was playing by the creek when a frog hopped up to her and informed her, in great detail, of the time, cause, and circumstances of her eventual death. She listened solemnly, and thanked it for its gift when it was done, as she had been taught. Then she went and told her grandmother all that had happened. Her grandmother was appropriately overjoyed. 

“Our family’s chock-full of great servites, and you’ll surely be one of them,” she said. “It’s a sign from Great God above. You’ve been blessed. You’re special, my little frog child. The loa have their eye on you. Someday you’ll serve as well as ever I did.”

The witch listened to this, and believed it, and went about the business of being a child, with the secret happy knowledge that soon all this washing and sewing and training would be taken away from her and she would be given real work to do. She held the secret of her death inside her and polished it over and loved it as if it were a rare and shining gift. In the Hounfor, as her father delivered his droning salute to Hounto, she gazed at the carved snakes by the altar and thought,  _I will spend my whole life demonstrating my gratitude to you._

Later on, when she was a little wiser, although not much, she came to understand that in terms of actual knowledge she had been shamelessly cheated. While the secrets of her death were certainly very interesting, it was impossible to really prepare for or avoid one’s own death, and as such they were also ultimately useless. It would have been much more helpful to know about some of the events that took place while she was still alive. Without hesitation, she would have traded that knowledge to have the certainty, as a starving fifteen-year-old with a howling baby, that in not too long a time she would be warm and fed with a man who did not find her repulsive to touch. The frog had fed her an intriguing and decorative story with no practical value at all. She spent years thinking of herself as very wise and privileged because she knew a little bit about what was probably the least important part of her life. In time, she realized that this is generally the way of the loa. The wisdom they distribute is deceptive, enough to make one cocky, but not to provide any real power. Nothing is free. They give enough knowledge to provide the illusion of safety, and then destroy that illusion without warning or mercy. 

“Mama,” Lucifer says, with that slow tone that means he’s about to ask an unanswerable question. 

She bites back a sigh. It’s her own fault for encouraging him to be curious. “Yes?”

“If you’re not a priestess—“

“Mambo,” she corrects automatically. 

“Mambo, sorry—will I ever be a priest? A Houngan, I mean?”

There it is; a question that is a dozen other questions wrapped into one. He’s good at those. “By the assessment of our family, no, you will never really be a Houngan,” she says, keeping her voice as even as she can. “There are some kinds of training I can’t give you.” 

“But—“ his brow wrinkles. “What will I be, then?”

Unbidden, there comes the ugly memory of the whispers that had haunted her father’s house, only surfacing once in a great while.  _Bokor._ Those who serve the loa with both hands. Those who have no church, and speak with animals and demons. Necessary, but not liked, respected, or trusted. 

She smiles at him, and taps his nose with her finger. 

“You’ll be you,” she says. “My little devil. Go fetch your brother for dinner.”

When she was a child, they all thought that her patron would be Ayida-Weddo. No one said it, of course, but it was understood, in the way that these things often are in families. The Rainbow Serpent had been her grandmother’s patron, had even ridden her sometimes, back when she was younger and her body better able to handle it. In the Hounfor, they chanted and prayed to Bondye and the ancestors and all the saints, but it was Ayida-Weddo that the witch always thought of when she reached out in supplication. She wanted to belong to the Rainbow Serpent. She wanted the Rainbow Serpent to protect her. 

The Rainbow Serpent did not protect her. And she learned, in the most painful way possible, that the loa chooses the servite, and not the other way around. 

There was a moment, in that basement. Afterwards, things were broken and hallucinatory; did this happen, no it was this, no I made that up. Trying to untangle the memories was like constantly catching glimpses of something out of the corner of her eye, but always turning a second too late. But she knows that there had been a moment when she was there in the middle of the dark and the delirium, and the man with the luminous blue eyes had taken her clothes and left her naked in her own blood, when she reached a kind of unbearable clarity. She looked into the darkness and thought to herself, I can’t let this happen. I thought that someone else was protecting me but no one else is protecting me and I can’t protect myself. People are going to hurt me and I can’t change that. So I will change myself so that I can’t be hurt. I will make myself something different. I’m tired of being human. I will be a monster now. I will never be weak like this again. 

He came back after that, and things became fractured again, but that moment stayed with her. It was that moment when Marinette came to her. The wolf woman with bloody jaws. Anima Sola, angel of torture, mother of revolutions. Marinette put her burning hands on her soul and pulled her out of the stinking wound of the basement, like a black womb of second birth. The scars that Marinette left on her became armor. Marinette pulled out her fingernails and gave her claws. Protection comes in many forms. 

When they were taking her to the hospital, her father was with her, his face crumpled and wrecked with tears. She tried to tell him that things were all right. She said to him, “I know so many things now. I know things no one else does.” He wouldn’t listen. He didn’t believe her. No one ever did. They thought she was crazy after that, even when she was telling the truth. Her grandmother would not look at her. The women who were assigned to bandage and bathe her touched her as if she was rotting. Somehow everyone knew that she had become something different in that basement. They were afraid of her. They were right to be afraid of her. The blue-eyed man inhabited her body like a ghost, and she felt his presence at odd and horrifying times. Sometimes she could feel him looking out of her eyes, counting her teeth with a white finger, writing secret messages on her bones. He was a part of her now, maybe a larger part than she herself was. Nowhere was safe, not even the privacy of her own flesh. Nowhere had ever been safe. She had been a fool to think it was. The world was full of violence, and the worst violence had always been living inside her the whole time. 

The next month, her female cycle, which had only started recently, did not come. After that, things happened quickly. Within two weeks she found herself under a bench, alone, abruptly deprived of home, family, and any destination. Marinette spoke to her again. She said “My daughter. My good child.”

“I’m not your daughter,” the witch replied. “I’m not anyone’s daughter anymore.”

“I gave you what you wanted,” Marinette said. Her voice was the wind and the whisper of blood in the witch’s veins. “I made you new.”

The witch wrapped her arms around herself. It was a cold night. She thought she could hear the faint flutter of a second heartbeat beneath her own. “I think I’m going to die,” she said. 

“You survived the basement,” Marinette. “You will survive this also. As will your son.”

The witch closed her eyes. “My son?”

“It will be a son,” Marinette said. 

After that, she said nothing, for a time. 

A woman comes to her, with the trembling confidence that her husband stays out too late and smells like flowers and sex when he returns. The witch tells her to dab a finger dipped in her menstrual blood in her husband’s coffee, and sends her on her way. Lucifer watches from the kitchen table with interest. After the woman goes on her way, he asks “Will I ever be as good at this as you are?”

The witch returns to chopping parsley with neat efficiency. “You will. Someday, you’ll be better, too.”

“Better than you?” He laughs at that, his open, delighted, child’s laugh. He doesn’t believe her. To him, she is the most powerful woman in the world. It’s a pleasant delusion, and one that she’s in no hurry to dispel. 

She loves him dearly, her strange demon son, falling somewhere in between mistake and miracle. Her life is more for his sake than hers. She adores him in a painful, bewildering, way which she will never be able to fully express to him or to anyone, and so she does not speak of it, and hopes that he knows anyway. Her love is an undiscovered country, mapped out in the lines of powdered herbs laid out for conjure bags, and the geography of the veves she traces for him in flour on the kitchen table. It does not live in words, but in the silent exchange of knowledge. As she teaches him, she hopes that he can hear the things she doesn’t say.  _Look at this. This is our family. This is our blood. You and I are part of something too immense and wonderful for others to understand. Look at all you can have and do and become. We are made of the same thing. Special. Blessed._

And then, sometimes, there are the days when the savage thing that lives in her grows restless and claws at her ribs like a rabid dog, desperate for something to kill. Those are the days when she turns hungry and mean, and screams about nothing, and the air in the house is like wire. On those days, for no reason at all, at times which surprise even her, she will turn to Lucifer and say something so astonishingly horrible that it takes her breath away. Her own talent for cruelty terrifies her. There’s always an instant between when she says it and when she wants to apologize where he stares at her in expressionless shock, and then, when she’s on the verge of begging his forgiveness, she sees his gaze turn slightly inwards. He does not even consider that she might be wrong, so he looks for the flaw in himself that makes her do these things. 

She likes that. She likes that he doubts himself, so consistently and profoundly. He thinks that there’s something wrong with him, and part of her agrees. There is something wrong with him, just as there is with her. It’s the same wrongness that makes her do these meaningless cruel things, the same wrongness that was put inside her by his father, that lives in him also. It’s the same wrongness that makes them so well-suited to this work, and its attendant burdens of darkness and pain. 

Her son will never have a normal life. She knows this, just as she knew it about herself, when she was young. Gabriel, with his untouched soul and easy humour, will grow up to experience human joys and human suffering, live a normal life span, do good things but not extraordinary things. Lucifer will never have that. She can’t give him the kind of simple comfort that she can give Gabe. 

Instead, she gives him power. She gives him knowledge. If she can’t make him happy, she will make him strong. She will teach him the stories and spells and mysteries which are his birthright, and which he is already so good at. She will make him so powerful that he will never have to be afraid of anyone. That is her gift to her son. He will surpass her and all their ancestors. Bokor or not, he will be the greatest of all their bloodline. 

The path to this goal sometimes seems unkind to him, she knows. She sees him looking at her sometimes, wondering if she loves him the way she does Gabe, One day he’ll understand. One day he will know all the things she can’t tell him. 

For now, he is her son, and she is the witch. They live together with Chuck and Gabe and all their secrets. And if they are not always happy, at least they are together. It’s enough. It’s enough because it has to be enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Birthday, Parvati! Don't know if this will be up early or late for you...time zones and all that jazz.
> 
> Hope you all enjoyed it.  
> There'll be more extra chapters coming at some point in the future. This summer, probably. Just a guess.


End file.
